Viral face filter app FaceApp is back, with a new gender-swapping function. Is the Russian owned app ... [+] a danger to your privacy?

Face-changing app FaceApp went viral last year as people used its old filter to find out what theyd look like in 50 years. Now, the app is back with a new gender-swapping filter thats once again taking social media by storm.

FaceApp is certainly a fun app, but is it a danger to your privacy?

FaceApp was launched in 2017, but it wasnt until its resurgence last year thatconcerns were raised about the Russian owned app having access to potentially millions of photos. At the time, a closer look revealed that Russian owned FaceApp wasnt all that badthe risks were hyped, as they often are with anything that goes viral.

But in December last year, the FBI issued a warning about FaceApp, sayingFaceApp and other apps developed in Russia are potential counterintelligence threat.

Its not long since FaceApp came crashing back into the mainstream, and people are again concerned. This week, theWashington Postran an article raising questions about the appwhat data does FaceApp collect, what is FaceApp doing with this information, who has access to it, and how can your data be deleted?

Likemany other apps, FaceApp does include trackers from Facebook and AdMob, and users in Russia may have their data stored in the country. But FaceApp ownerYaroslav Goncharov is adamant that the app does not share data with Russian authorities.

At the same time, it wouldnt be crazy to think an app that collected peoples photos might store it for use in the future for, I dont know, facial recognition? Again, Goncharov says no. When Goncharov and I exchanged some emails and he told me:We do not use the photos for any reason other than to provide the editing functionality.

Meanwhile, he underscored that FaceAppdeletes photos from its cloud servers within 24 to 48 hours after they are last edited. All photos are encrypted using a key stored locally on your devicethey are only temporarily cached on the apps cloud servers during the editing process.

FaceAppsprivacy policyhas been recently updated to reflect some more stringent controls and I asked a privacy expert to take a look.Rowenna Fielding, head of individual rights and ethics at Protecture saysFaceApps updated privacy policy is pretty solid and reassuring because it states explicitly that uploaded photos will only be used for the app itself and not shared or re-used for any other reason.

Reading between the lines, the purpose of improving the app probably includes training the algorithm itself, which has little impact on the individual who has uploaded their photo, she explains.

However, that doesnt mean FaceApp is risk freewith any free service, such as Google andFacebook, you are giving up some data in exchange for its use.

Jake Moore, cybersecurity specialist at ESET warns: When anything is free, you must always ask yourself what is in it for the owners of the app and how do they make their money?

He advises users to read every apps terms of use, pointing out that companies often have hidden agendas to gain mass information for purposes such as teaching facial recognition algorithms, or learning connections from phone contacts.

Fieldingagrees that like many free services, FaceApp includes the possibility of a large number of secondary data extractions and uses that have little to do with the function of the app itself.

She also warns that the social login facility opens up a much wider doorway for data-scraping by third parties. Therefore, she says: Id hardly call it privacy-friendly, but there has clearly been a significant effort to identify and explain the uses of data associated with the app.

On the surface of it, Fielding would give FaceApps privacy notice an 8 out of 10.

So FaceApp seems ok, but also be aware that deleting your data might not be as straightforward as it seems. The Washington Post mentions that simply deleting the app wont get rid of the photos FaceApp may have in the cloud. Goncharov said people can put in a request to delete all data from FaceApps servers, but the process is convoluted, the article reads.

So on the surface, its not exactly privacy-friendly, but FaceApp doesnt appear to be a huge danger to your privacy. Even so, remember that handing your data over to any app is still a risk, and most do share it with third parties in some way.

Its important to think firstif you really want to use FaceApp, go ahead, just make sure you are aware of the caveats and ensure share the risks with others too.

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FaceApp Privacy: What You Need To Know About The Viral Russian App - Forbes

Flash storage is increasingly important to the enterprise market, andanalysts expect solid state storage to largely replace spinning disks for enterprise systems, endpoints and consumer devices possibly within this decade.

Meanwhile, some predict spinning disk will be used mostly by superscalers the likes of Google and Facebook and the cloud providers.

The latter centred on the big three AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform are investing heavily in SSD technology as well.

Buyers of the longest-established cloud storage applications, such as backup, recovery and archiving, are largely agnostic about the underlying hardware they use. Key metrics there are cost per GB per month, availability, and for applications that hold sensitive data, geography.

For the cloud providers scale matters, and drives demand for ever larger hard drives, with 50TB on supplier roadmaps.

But other cloud applications demand performance that hard drives cannot offer. The answer lies in flash storage.

With cloud vendors chasing the market for higher performance applications, including production enterprise systems, flash storage is increasingly important for high performance object storage.

Object storage, though, is not alone. The big three cloud vendors now offer flash technology for block and file too, for compute workloads and virtual machines.

AWS, for example, introduced SSD as the default option for its Elastic Block Store (EBS) general purpose volumes back in 2014. The cloud vendor targeted SSD storage at small to medium-sized databases, development and test environments, and boot volumes. The other large vendors have similar offerings.

The aim is to narrow the gap between storage performance in the cloud, and in the datacentre.

Moving to flash storage in the cloud improves the performance of cloud-based compute instances and thats one reason the suppliers offer premium tiers for storage-intensive applications such as databases.

Flash storage bolsters the performance of virtual machines, and should make it easier to transfer workloads between on-prem systems and the cloud, with reduced or at least predictable performance penalties.

As ever, the capabilities depend on the architecture IT teams choose, and their choice of cloud platform.

The three largest cloud vendors AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform all have a range of flash storage options that mix cost, capacity and performance.

Amazon Web Services provides SSD storage across its block storage EBS, GP2 and IO1 volumes, as well as file storage FSx Windows and FSx Lustre.

EBS: EBS solid state drives are available as general purpose (GP2) and provisioned IOPS SSD (IO1). For GP2, capacity ranges from 1GB to 16GB, maximum IOPS per volume is 16,000 and maximum throughput is 2,375MBps. For IO1, capacity is 4GB to 16GB and IOPS is 64,000.

FSx: FSx For Windows is an SMB file share, based on Windows Server, although it can connect to Windows, Linux or MacOS clients. Available as SSD or HDD, AWS claims sub-millisecond latency for the SSD variants. Each file system supports up to 64TB of data, and users can specify throughput from 8MBps to 2048MBps.

FSx for Lustre supports three tiers of persistent storage: Persistent-50, Persistent-100 and Persistent-200, with a baseline throughput of 250, 500 and 750 MBps per TB of storage respectively. This is based around 10,000 IOPS. AWS claims FSx Lustre operates up to petabyte scale.

Microsoft Azure provides Azure Managed Disks as its block-level storage option for Azure VMs. As with AWS, there are solid state and magnetic options. Microsoft also offers NetApp files, Premium Files and storage accounts.

Azure Managed Disks: The top tier of storage is for I/O-intensive workloads, including SQL and Oracle databases and SAP HANA. Maximum disk size is 65,536GB, IOPS of 160,000 and throughput at 2,000MBps. Premium SSD, recommended for production workloads, has a 32,767GB maximum disk size, 900 MBps maximum throughput and 20,000 max IOPS.

For web servers, test & dev and lightly-used applications, Azure suggests its standard SSD, with specs of 32,767GB, 750 MBps throughput and 6,000 IOPS.

Azure Files: Azure Premium Files is a high-performance, SSD-based file share. Users specify storage using a baseline GB/IOPS/throughput ratio, although Microsoft points out that this is also determined by the file system. The base tier is 100GB, baseline IOPS of 100 and burst up to 300 IOPS. This rises in steps to 102,400GB, and 100,000 IOPS.

NetApp Files also provides Ultra, Premium and Standard SSDs, compatible with any POSIX-compliant workload.

Azure Storage Accounts: Azures storage accounts support blob, file, queue, table and disk. General Purpose V2 and V1 support standard and premium storage tiers, BlockBlob Storage and FileStorage are Premium only and BlobStorage is Standard only.

Googles cloud provides its premium Local SSD storage for virtual machine instances and Persistent Disk for less demanding workloads.

Local SSD: Local SSDs are directly attached to the VM server used by Googles Compute Engine. Capacity is either 6TB or 9TB, made of up to 24 local SSD partitions.

Googles Local SSD is its premium storage tier, with persistent disk the lower cost, lower performance option. Performance ranges to 2,400,000 IOPS read and 1,200,000 IOPS write with read throughput up to 9,360MBps and write throughput of 4,680MBps (for 9 TB instances). Local SSD comes in two versions: SCSI and NVMe, with the highest performance available on NVMe.

Google recommends Local SSD for flash-optimised databases, hot caching layers for analytics applications, and application scratch disks.

Persistent Disk: Googles Persistent Disk platform supports flash and conventional hard disk volumes, up to 64TB. Instances can span up to 257TB, far higher than Local SSD. On costs, provisioned hard drive space is US$0.04 per GB per month, and SSD provisioned space US$0.17 per GB per month.

Read IOPS ranges from 15,000 to 100,000 per instance and 15,000 to 30,000 for writes.

Google recommends its persistent disk, block storage for virtual machines and databases.

Cloud providers look set to continue to offer flash and spinning disk storage for the foreseeable future.

The lower costs of hard disk storage continue to make sense in a large-scale cloud environment, and the cloud infrastructure providers are able to deal with the disadvantages of 20TB plus drives, such as long rebuild times.

But flash-based offerings will continue to grow, to support production-grade VMs, file-based storage and more demanding applications such as analytics and AI.

The exact mix of flash options, or flash and HDD options, will depend on the workload, pricing, and the cloud providers storage tiers. Specifying flash storage on-premises and in the cloud will maximise performance and compatibility, and make it easier to tier storage to the cloud: an option more storage, and application vendors, are working towards.

The rest is here:
Cloud flash storage: SSD options from AWS, Azure and GCP - ComputerWeekly.com

For years, investors bid up tech stocks on the idea that digital transformation was inevitable. The Covid-19 crisis has proved them right.

We have seen two years worth of digital transformation in two months, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently told investors.

But the acceleration creates questions: How much growth is left? And has it all been priced in? The Nasdaq Composite is up 12% on the year, versus a 4% decline for the S&P 500 index.

Ive been following tech for 41 years, and this is the second most expensive tech market Ive ever seensecond only to the internet bubble 20 years ago, says Fred Hickey, editor of the High Tech Strategist, a monthly newsletter. Hickey has long been skeptical of tech valuations, but this time the fundamentals are on his side. The Nasdaq Composite currently trades at 3.4 times forward sales, well above a 10-year average of 2.3, according to FactSet.

The issue for investors is that fundamentals often dont apply to tech stocks. During the pandemic, investors that bought high-price tech stocks have been richly rewarded. Steve Milunovich, the technology strategist at Wolfe Research, makes the remarkable observation that tech stocks that entered 2020 with a price-to-sales multiple of 10 times or higher have gained 35% on the year. Momentum has taken over. While price/earnings is the most common valuation metric in investing, investors often use sales multiples for tech companies since earnings can be depressed, or nonexistent, during periods of high growth.

Ted Mortonson, technology strategist at Baird, the Milwaukee-based investment firm, says there are good reasons for elevated valuations. He says that were in the most powerful integrated technology growth cycle since the late 1990s, pointing to the acceleration of cloud computing, e-commerce, and telehealth, and the arrival of fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless and new chips. It all adds up to big growth potential at a time when theres limited growth in other industries. Growth investors have bought tech stocks, he says, because theyve had few other choices.

But Mortonson also sees risks. If one or more cloud players disappoint during the next round of earnings reports, the stock reversal could be severe. He advises keeping an eye on secondary data points like billings, contract duration, and deals time-to-close. He fears that investors may not be factoring in the impact of unemployment on companies with per seat revenue models. There are a lot of knowledge workers off the payroll, he says. Mortonson also sees risks ahead for subscription-based cloud services as renewal cycles heat up in the second half.

As those risks mount, valuations could resume their importance. So, Barrons went looking for cheap tech. We searched for U.S. technology stocks with market values of more than $5 billion and growing sales in the current fiscal year. That revenue requirement excluded some of the cheapest stocks in tech, including Dell Technologies (ticker: DELL), HP Inc. (HPQ), and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). We then ranked the results by price-to-sales multiples, using current fiscal-year revenue estimates.

*Based on current fiscal years estimated revenue

Source: FactSet

The screen is revealing: There are still a few cheapand growingtech companies to be found. Disk-drive maker Western Digital (WDC) trades for less than one times sales. Rival Seagate Technology (STX) is just a bit higher at 1.2. Accenture (ACN), the information-technology consulting firm, is at 2.9. Meanwhile, chip giant Intel (INTC) and MKS Instruments (MKSI), a maker of chip-making tools, trade at less than 3.5 times. F5 Networks (FFIV), which helps companies digitally distribute software, trades at 3.7 times this years sales.

The list of high-multiple names wont come as a surprise to anyone who has been keeping tabs on the markets obsession with work-from-home plays. In fact, the roster is a whos who of cloud-based software stocks, companies like Datadog (DDOG), Zoom Video Communications (ZM), Coupa Software (COUP), Okta (OKTA), and Cloudflare (NET). Their financial results are sterling, but their valuations are no longer tied to fundamentals.

Value investors can still find a home in tech, though. The disk-drive makers on our cheap list could be a compelling opportunity in the year ahead. Western Digital shares have been hurt by the companys May decision to suspend its quarterly dividend and redirect the cash to paying down debt from the companys 2016 acquisition of SanDisk for $19 billion. The deal, while expensive, remains a shrewd diversification move, giving the disk-drive maker an important role in superfast solid-state drives.

Milunovich says that Western Digital should benefit in the back half of the year from an expected pickup in flash-memory pricingand hes bullish on the companys new CEO, former Cisco executive David Goeckeler. Unlike some other legacy tech companies, meanwhile, Western Digitaland Seagateremains relevant in a cloud-based world. Their drives are still necessary for cloud-based computing and storage.

Three of the names on our cheap-tech list come from the IT consultancy arena. Two of them are government-focused IT services contractors CACI International (CACI) and Leidos Holdings (LDOS)and both are growing sales more than 10% annually.

The other is Accenture, a broad-based provider of tech consulting services. Accenture tends to work on-site with clients, and those consultants are largely grounded, as is the stock. But once the economy rebounds, the push toward digital transformation should keep Accentures consultants busy, boosting the stock.

Finding a longtime tech leader like Intel among a list of cheap stocks might seem surprising, but the company has been battered by a combination of market share losses to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and ongoing manufacturing issues. Other recent headlines havent been kind to Intel, including reports that Apple (AAPL) is ready to design its own processors for some of its Mac computers.

But Intel still controls 95% of the market for server processors and more than 80% of the PC processor market. Despite the current issues, Intel shares remain a compelling bet on the future of computing. This past week, KeyBanc Capital Markets raised its rating on the stock to Overweight from Sector Weight, noting that Intel should benefit from its push into markets beyond PC microprocessors, including data centers, artificial intelligence, 5G, and the Internet of Things.

F5 Networks is one of the smaller names on our cheap-tech list. The company makes software that accelerates the performance and security of web applications, and its in the middle of transitioning to a subscription-based model. Those transitions are painful in the near term, but they usually prove rewarding for investors over time.

Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani recently wrote to clients that he sees potential for a much higher stock price as F5 shifts to a recurring revenue modelmore like the cloud-based names on the other end of our screen.

MKS Instruments, meanwhile, is a longtime player in the semiconductor equipment industry that has expanded into optical components. This week, Needham analyst James Ricchiuti picked up coverage of the stock with a Buy rating. He contends that MKS is a rare company that does M&A well. The expansion into optical parts like lasers has reduced the cyclicality of its business.

One of the ironies of tech is that even the companies battered by the cloud have significant cloud exposure these days. Intel processors are used in cloud-based servers. Seagate and Western Digital drives are used in cloud storage; F5 is trying to evolve into a cloud-style business model. And Cienas networking components are finding strong demand from cloud leaders like Amazon.com (AMZN), Facebook (FB), and Alphabets Google (GOOGL).

The cloud is now everywhere, and at some point it could even lift the stocks of the cheapest tech names.

Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com

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How to Profit from the Growing Divide in Tech Stocks. - Barron's

Lenovo Data Center Group has announced new solutions to empower customers to simplify common data management challenges. DCG has announced the launch of the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 servers, which now feature 3rd-Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with support for SAP HANA based on Intel Optane persistent memory 200 series. In addition, Lenovo announced new remote deployment service offerings for the ThinkSystem DM7100 storage systems.

Lenovo claims that its new ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 servers feature the latest in high-end processing and memory capabilities, with twice the amount of NVMe storage capacity.

ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2

These systems, as per Lenovo, feature improved AI acceleration with Intel Deep Learning Boost enhanced with bfloat16. They also feature technologies that like increased onboard storage from 24 to 48 2.52 drives and GPU support on the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 server (four double-wide 300W or eight single-wide GPUs).

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Lenovo announces ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 servers - Gadgets Now

When your company outgrows shared web hosting but doesnt have enough data to fill an entire server, what do you do? Thats where VPS hosting comes in handy.

A VPS is a virtual private server. With VPS hosting, your provider carves out a dedicated space on an existing server through a process known as virtualization.

VPS hosting is a win-win. You get your own standalone computing resources without being forced to buy up an entire servers CPUs and RAM. The hosting provider gets to host several VPSs on a single server at the same time, often at a slight markup relative to selling a whole server in one piece.

One of the best things about VPS hosting is that its extremely flexible. Since your server space is fully isolated, you can install whatever operating system you want. In fact, multiple businesses operating independent VPSs on a single server can each run different operating systems and different software. Your VPS space can be fully managed or you can be left on your own to develop apps and build your own cybersecurity system.

On top of that, since your computing space is a virtual carve-out from a larger server, you can easily scale up or down as needed. Thats a big advantage if you need to quickly adapt to spikes in web traffic or add resources for a short-term development project.

Shared hosting is what most businesses use when they first start out. Its inexpensive and simple to manage. But ultimately, shared hosting isnt flexible enough for many growing businesses. Youre always competing with other users for server resources, which can be an issue as your web traffic grows or your IT team begins to develop internal software.

When your business outgrows shared hosting, VPS hosting is the next step up. Its cheaper than a dedicated server, but you can get as many resources as you need and scale as your bandwidth needs continue to grow

In addition, VPS hosting gives you the freedom to treat your hosting space as a sandbox for development. You wont be able to modify your operating system on a shared hosting plan, for example, but you can with VPS hosting.

Purchasing a dedicated server may be great for enterprise-scale businesses, but its overkill for most small- and medium-sized companies. Why pay for computational resources you dont need? VPS hosting can save you quite a bit of money compared to a dedicated server, and you have the ability to scale up your CPUs, RAM, and bandwidth if you find that you need more computing power.

When choosing a VPS hosting service, you have a couple of different options.

First is the type of disk your data will be stored on. Traditional VPS hosting uses hard disk drives (HDDs) because theyre inexpensive. But, a number of VPS hosts are turning to solid-state disks (SSDs) since theyre much more reliable than HDDs. Another benefit to SSDs for VPS hosting is that they can handle more simultaneous input and output operations than HDDs. So you wont be slowed down when other VPS users on the same server go to access data.

Cloud VPS is VPS hosting spread across multiple servers. That means that your data can live in multiple data centers around the world, giving you faster loading times in different markets. Importantly, cloud VPS is also more resilient than traditional VPSsince you have access to servers around the world, your web services wont be knocked offline by a regional disaster or a single malfunctioning server.

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Everything your business needs to know about VPS - Tom's Guide